Recent reviews by Inlex

After rediscovering the soundtrack today, I feel compelled to write a review for this fantastic piece of art, after not having played the game in years. I feel this is probably one of the most well-rounded and atmospherically accurate game soundtracks of all time. And listening to it in it's entirety made me re-install the game for another run.

The music captures the feel of the Witcher world perfectly. Yes, it is very similar to the soundtrack of Witcher 2 and 3 (which are also fantastic). But rarely do you find a soundtrack of which literally every piece of music is top notch.

That's 28 tracks of music, ranging from 1m30 to 3+ minutes. Even as a standalone album, it should be a classic. But together with this very well-crafted game, it really brings the game world alive. Which is no small feat for a iso-adventure/card game.

The game itself: If you like the Witcher world in any way - especially lore-wise - but are unsure about Gwent: Still recommended.
However, if you have a problem with TCG/card strategy games in general, maybe this is not your cup of tea, as it is very heavily based on (a slightly modified version) of the Gwent game.

But what the game tries to do, it does very, very well. The story is great, the characters are gripping (again, not easy for a game that's essentially a text-based adventure) and the replayability is relatively high.

And again.. If even only to play the game again to have the fantastic music getting your blood pumping, it's worth the purchase and/or re-run.

(PS: Play the soundtrack in the steam music/soundtrack player while playing other games with crappy soundtracks. You'll love those games more for it)

9/10 - it's not for everyone, but top quality in what it does

It feels like nearly a decade ago, I saw a trailer for this with something like:

"All kinds of resources: Aluminum, iron, and EVEN A-LU-MI-NI-UM"

Made them take my money just for that. 10/10

== DO NOT BUY THIS == DO NOT BUY THIS == DO NOT BUY THIS ==

TL;DR: This game is a piece of hot garbage. It's stupidly addictive, but everything that should feel rewarding in the end, just feels like nothingness. If you get it at all. Culminating in me having spent half a day to get the Grand Slam achievement (Pole, Win, Lead all laps, Fastest Lap) and when I finally got it, the garbage disposal didn't even award the achievement. Because it's broken. Like almost everything else in the game (even after the 1.6 update, it's still a hot mess)

DO NOT BUY THIS. EVER.

(above was edited in on Sep 1st '24)
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This game reminds me why I haven't bought a full-priced game in at least a decade. When studios start delivering a FINISHED product by the time they release their clone of last year's game, I might start considering buying games again at full price.

Sadly, I won't live until the 24th century.

Why?

Completely boring and shallow overhyped 'mentality' system. All it is, is people saying "I don't like other staff' or 'car performance'.

Contracts are completely broken.
Yes I know it's a reported issue. But it breaks the game. So it's ♥♥♥♥.
F2 drivers earning more than the main drivers. But you can't fire them, because you have to pay them 12 bazillon rupees to buy off the contract.

Want to stop another team from poaching staff you spent all year cultivating by renewing their contract and offering them a better deal?
Sure, no problem.

As long as you first buy out their entire bug-bloated contract to then offer them a signing fee AND more money. Doesn't that sound sweet? No? Well.. you can just let them go and have Lawrence Troll put them on their payroll for half what you were paying them and get nothing for it. That man knows how to do business!

Also:
Bugs, and not a few of them. Most of them game breaking as well.
For instance: Red flag during practice or qualy? No problem!

Set your pitstop info and send them out.

Oh.. you sent them out before the session was actually restarted? No problem! Your driver will exist in Limbo from now on. But you can always use the other driver! (If you hadn't sent them as well).

Also featuring (I'll keep adding to this list because there are so many broken things it's hard to keep track):
Dozens of race engineer lines of gibberish:
Every single line of 'car X is ahead/behind' is wrong. It's ALWAYS the exact opposite of what they're saying.



Blue flags in this universe are also reversed. When Maxipad is barreling down on my vastly underpaid back-field driver with his rocket ship, I'm always told that they will get the blue flag when we approach them. It seems there was never a consideration that people would not choose to be Red Bull, but actually start with a tier 5 team.

EVERYTHING INVOLVING LAPPED CARS IS BUSTED. FUSTRATINGLY SO
Lapping cars or being lapped can cause the world to stop revolving. Want to lap a car? Sure. They'll gladly stop for you on the racing line. Are you getting lapped? No problem, I'll go sit here in the corner and wait for the lapped car and the fifteen following cars on my own lap to also go by.

"Don't fight team mate" means "I will stop, let my team mate by AND the fifteen following cars, while I sit here in the corner"

If you're chasing a car closely on a track like Zandvoort, and there are lapped cars every 3 corners, the chasing car WILL get blocked by the lapped car EVERY time. It gets out of the way for the first (usually literally parking on the racing line), then violently switches sides once the first car is by, promting the chasing car to slam the brakes. Even if the car miraculously does not decide to move around, the chasing car still slams the brakes. No matter how much room there is. IT IS AN ABSOLUTE HORROR SHOW

DO..NOT..BUY..THIS

EVER

----
Unintentional silliness

Potentially intentional brokenness

And most of all, safety cars. If you want a simulation of how it's like to drive through the city center of New Delhi during Holi festival during the apocalypse on Black Friday, cause an incident at Zandvoort. You will have a truly authentic experience.

Most annoying game I want to keep playing. Though will never pay for it again. 4/10

Giant dinosaurs mauling millions of humanoid rats with barf cannons. 10/10

Recreating Chernobyl, and still failing - 10/10

--- Extensive review will follow once the game is more near completion, but even in the current (still) early state, I wholeheartedly recommend this game to anyone who loves a complex city builder that requires you to find, produce, and refine everything you need to build and maintain a civilization. All the way from coal mines to airplane factories and almost every step imaginable in between.

Yes, that includes finding a way to get rid of the nuclear waste that is accumulated through running a nuclear power plant which is needed to keep up with the ever-growing energy demand of your rail network, residential areas and industrial complexes, while hauling hundreds of truckloads of gravel, just to be able to keep constructing roads, while waiting for the tractors to harvest your GIANT crop fields so your intoxicated workers can get their ass out of the pub to finally bake some bread. And Vodka. Always boils down to Vodka. ---

- Is it bug- or issue-free?
No
- Is multiplayer a must?
No
-Is it an actual Fallout game?
Absolutely

I spent over 1000 hours in Adventure mode (bethesda.net, not Steam) and have not been able to stop. At first, playing solo through basically all the content, later in groups as well. It's both very much feasible.
Don't be put-off by the incessant whining of people who haven't given the game a real chance.

View it as a 'early-access' title, which it should have been at launch, and which is almost completed now. If you love Fallout as a universe and it's lore, this is still a game for you.

The music alone is worth whatever you pay for the game. Just don't pay too much cause it goes to EA. Donate to Frank Klepacki.

I built a sink out of some Copper Wire and an Electric Furnace and saw all the time go into it. 10/10

Edit after 1.0:

The best title ever to make it out of early access like a pro. These guys are the perfect example of a dedicated dev team with both passion for the game and loyalty to their customers/fanbase.

11/10

Haters will hate. Actually having to use skill to play a game can be hard sometimes. This DLC is worth a lot more than many other full on 'AA' titles. Just don't suck at being a human and use your brain to figure out why your elves are getting eaten up by rat babies.

I completely second what this guy said, but since I CBA to type that much, take the link. His word is god:

https://steamproxy.com/profiles/76561197970524174/recommended/534331/

TL:DR: Everything's clunky, information supply is next to zero and above all: the game stops being fun within 15 minutes.
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I rarely review titles, and am normally a fairly tolerant person when it comes to games like these: Usually faults will be fixed, or are blown up to be more than they really are.

However, this is the most disappointing game I have played in years. I usually enjoy Paradox games a lot, and I think 4X and builder games are the ones I have played most by far. This experience can be blinding in some situations, because you intuitively correct any mistakes or misinformation a game gives you.

This time, there was no correcting.

The game starts with ZERO explanation. Nothing. You can either pick 'new game' or 'easy start'. Easy start actually gives you LESS info than a normal 'new game', because new game at least lets you pick some perks, which will give you some idea of what you might be dealing with. Easy Start just throws you on mars with some drones and clunky UI and there's that.

The sense of progression is close to nothing, and the curve of that little progression is horrible. If you slightly went off-course by using a little too much fuel or building one maintenance-heavy building too many, you might end up waiting for 15 minutes to get your machine parts or polymer that you need to reset the mistake you made.

Controls are not good. If you want to assign drones to another hub, for instance, you have to select the (tiny) drones individually and right-click the new hub. There's no 'dragging' there's no "assign this unit to X". It's just "left-click, scroll drag over to the target, right click." Theoretically, you can use the map, but the chance that you deselect the drone you were trying to reassign in that process is too big.

The whole 'dome' principle looks appealing and is fun to start with. Until you realise you have to keep your first 10 colonists alive for 10 days, before you're allowed more colonists. This essentially means: Wait for 15 minutes.
Now, there's some logic to that, as Earthlings might want to know if people might actually survive on Mars. You're even told that the 10 days can be shortened, if you manage to get colonists to reproduce. A tooltip even says that you should build an infirmary to improve healthcare and that chances of a birth are higher because the comfort threshhold for a colonist to be born on mars is reduced. What the thresholds are, or what the chances might have been in either case, are completely unknown. As is much much more information in this game.

This is the first builder I have played in a long time that made me want to stop playing with less than 10 hours played. I felt I wasted my entire weekend on watching people get "Earth Sick" and waiting for the snail-like speed of my polymer factories to produce that one polymer to get to my solar panel that didn't work anymore because it had dust in it from my concrete factory that was no longer producing concrete because there was too much waste rock in the vicinity, which made my drones stupid and refusing to remove the concrete. Which in turn, caused my power grid to fail because the drones weren't repairing the power grid and everybody died.

I rarely ever buy anything 'deluxe' or preorder season passes because I rather just pay for the DLC when it comes out, when I know I like the game anyway. I cannot state how much I regret buying this season pass.